I am sitting in one of the clubhouses of Watergate Marina here in Kemah. It is an upscale place featuring two swimming pools,multiple club houses with internet, big screen TV's, tennis courts and host of ammenities too long to enumerate here....and the slip fee is quite reasonable too, $250 US each month.

Right now our "Down Souther", El Caribe II is lying at the dock, after having the major discrepencies repaired, a loose rudder and a centerboard cable replacement. Now we are waiting on Blue Water Ship Store service department to correct what appears to be a fresh water cooling system problem in the W-50 so we can deliver South in a couple of weeks.....smack dab in the middle of "H" season too....

I am probably the most anxious since she will lay at the tip of Padre Island until the fall, at which time I hope to be able to deliver her further South, to the Rio Dulce. Otherwise this is a great place to just be. D and the twins love it, and it would be quite easy to just stay awhile. The idea of not coming here any more seems sort of strange....

Hell, they even have Dock Boys (and Girls) here a la Anchor Marina, on a somewhat grander and slightly elevated level ....living on any number of derelicts, tramps and vagabonds out there in the forest of masts that define this place. You are right Holding Pattern, there are Dock Boys everywhere. They drift in and out of this club house after affecting a minor modification or repair to their vessels, braving the sweltering, wet, vesuvian heat that defines the Kemah area this time of year, drifting in each time with a more and more discrenable scent of raw beer and sweat.

It has been exactly two weeks since I left my phony-baloney administrators position with the closest County to Mexico, and recently my friend Captain Sean called me on the phone admonishing me for not adding to this blog for a long time.

"Hey man....you're getting pretty lazy in your updates...you know people depend on you for information and stuff...."

Well, I guess I have been, and so I apologize.

I thought that once I left my phony-baloney administrators position I'd have all kinds of time to do things. Now I find just the opposite to be true. Far from the illusion of sitting on my front porch, drinking 40's and smoking black and milds, waiting for Wednesday to roll around....you know for the welfare check to show up in the mail....my days are pretty filled with chore after chore after chore.

I had no idea the number of things that had been neglected since I leased my soul to the devil County, and so for the past several weeks I have been scrambling to catch up on neglected items in my life. In fact, I have had to sort of postpone clients who want me to get busy with their environmental permitting issues for a couple of weeks till I can get all of this extraneous work caught up.

I just don't know how people with 9 to 5's keep everything straight....